The invention relates generally to monitoring devices and equipment for obtaining and illustrating data about a patient to which the equipment is connected, and more particularly to monitoring devices and methods for adjusting the thresholds for triggering alarms based on the data from the patient.
In monitoring or diagnostic devices that are currently utilized, the data obtained by the devices is compared to a set limit for the particular physiologic parameter being measured and represented by the incoming data to the device. When the data exceeds the limit, the device is configured, to trigger or set off an alarm in order to indicate the current condition of the patient to a treating physician or other medical care, professional that is monitoring the patient.
However, in many situations the limits or thresholds for the triggering of the alarms are set close to the ranges of normal fluctuations of the values for the parameters being monitored, providing a safety net to prevent adverse events from being missed. As such, even when the parameter value only drops below the alarm limit for an instant due to a non-critical event, the device will trigger an alarm based on that sensed value. While setting the alarm limit in this manner is a safeguard against any significant issue or clinically relevant alarm being missed, as a result of the closeness of the threshold or alarm limit to the normal; or acceptable ranges for this parameter, a large number of clinically irrelevant alarms are generated as well, further, it is not possible to differentiate the clinically relevant alarms from the clinically irrelevant alarms based on the parameter value alone, such that each alarm event must be acted on in the same manner by the medical personnel monitoring the patient.
One result of the large number of the clinically irrelevant alarm events is the unnecessary expenditure of personnel, time and resources in attending to the clinically irrelevant alarm events. Another result is that certain highly important clinical events could inadvertently be overlooked or missed amidst the normally much larger number of clinically irrelevant alarm events. This is often referred to as alarm fatigue and results from the constant representation of the alarm events in a similar manner that can cause certain events to become “lost” in the flood of alarms and associated information represented on the display screen of the particular device. However, while current physiologic limit alarms have a very high false positive rate, setting the limits wider can reduce false positives but at the risk of missing critical, events. Further, the standard alarm limits for many of these devices are often not determined based on the particular condition of the patient being monitored, which can increase the number of clinically irrelevant alarms.
Therefore, in order to address alarm fatigue and reduce the number of clinically irrelevant alarms that are generated, it is desirable to develop a monitoring device and associated alarm adjustment system that operates to adjust the thresholds for alarm generation based on the condition(s) of the particular patient being monitored. Such a device and system would allow for the effective determination of an adverse event using the adjusted threshold, while also allowing for variations in the monitored parameters to limit and/or reduce the number of alarms being triggered for clinically irrelevant events.